Lisel Mueller - Poems
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Classic Poetry Series Lisel Mueller - poems - Publication Date: 2004 Publisher: Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive Lisel Mueller(February 8, 1924) an American poet. She was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1924 and immigrated to America at the age of 15. Her father, Fritz Neumann, was a professor at Evansville College. Her mother died in 1953. "Though my family landed in the Midwest, we lived in urban or suburban environments," she once wrote. She and her husband, Paul Mueller (d. 2001) built a home in Lake Forest, Illinois in the 1960s, where they raised two daughters and lived for many years. Mueller currently resides in a retirement community in Chicago. Her poems are extremely accessible, yet intricate and layered. While at times whimsical and possessing a sly humor, there is an underlying sadness in much of her work. She graduated from the University of Evansville in 1944 and has taught at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst College in Illinois, and Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. Mueller has written book reviews for the Chicago Daily News. www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 1 A Day Like Any Other Such insignificance: a glance at your record on the doctor's desk or a letter not meant for you. How could you have known? It's not true that your life passes before you in rapid motion, but your watch suddenly ticks like an amplified heart, the hands freezing against a white that is a judgment. Otherwise nothing. The face in the mirror is still yours. Two men pass on the sidewalk and do not stare at your window. Your room is silent, the plants locked inside their mysterious lives as always. The queen-of-the-night refuses to bloom, does not accept your definition. It makes no sense, your scanning the street for a traffic snarl, a new crack in the pavement, a flag at half-mast -- signs of some disturbance in the world because your friend, the morning sun, has turned its dark side toward you. Lisel Mueller www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 2 Alive Together Speaking of marvels, I am alive together with you, when I might have been alive with anyone under the sun, when I might have been Abelard's woman or the whore of a Renaissance pope or a peasant wife with not enough food and not enough love, with my children dead of the plague. I might have slept in an alcove next to the man with the golden nose, who poked it into the business of stars, or sewn a starry flag for a general with wooden teeth. I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas or a woman without a name weeping in Master's bed for my husband, exchanged for a mule, my daughter, lost in a drunken bet. I might have been stretched on a totem pole to appease a vindictive god or left, a useless girl-child, to die on a cliff. I like to think I might have been Mary Shelley in love with a wrong-headed angel, or Mary's friend. I might have been you. This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent; still we have made it, alive in a time when rationalists in square hats and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses agree it is almost over, alive with our lively children who-but for endless ifs- might have missed out on being alive together with marvels and follies and longings and lies and wishes and error and humor and mercy and journeys and voices and faces www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 3 and colors and summers and mornings and knowledge and tears and chance. Lisel Mueller www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 4 Another Version Our trees are aspens, but people mistake them for birches; they think of us as characters in a Russian novel, Kitty and Levin living contentedly in the country. Our friends from the city watch the birds and rabbits feeding together on top of the deep, white snow. (We have Russian winters in Illinois, but no sleighbells, possums instead of wolves, no trusted servants to do our work.) As in a Russian play, an old man lives in our house, he is my father; he lets go of life in such slow motion, year after year, that the grief is stuck inside me, a poisoned apple that won't go up or down. But like the three sisters, we rarely speak of what keeps us awake at night; like them, we complain about things that don't really matter and talk of our pleasures and of the future: we tell each other the willows are early this year, hazy with green. Lisel Mueller www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 5 Bedtime Story The moon lies on the river like a drop of oil. The children come to the banks to be healed of their wounds and bruises. The fathers who gave them their wounds and bruises come to be healed of their rage. The mothers grow lovely; their faces soften, the birds in their throats awake. They all stand hand in hand and the trees around them, forever on the verge of becoming one of them, stop shuddering and speak their first word. But that is not the beginning. It is the end of the story, and before we come to the end, the mothers and fathers and children must find their way to the river, separately, with no one to guide them. That is the long, pitiless part, and it will scare you. Lisel Mueller www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 6 Blood Oranges In 1936, a child in Hitler's Germany, what did I know about the war in Spain? Andalusia was a tango on a wind-up gramophone, Franco a hero's face in the paper. No one told me about a poet for whose sake I might have learned Spanish bleeding to death on a barren hill. All I knew of Spain were those precious imported treats we splurged on for Christmas. I remember pulling the sections apart, lining them up, sucking each one slowly, so the red sweetness would last and last -- while I was reading a poem by a long-dead German poet in which the woods stood safe under the moon's milky eye and the white fog in the meadows aspired to become lighter than air. Lisel Mueller www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 7 Curriculum Vitae 1992 1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea. 2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of course I do not remember this. 3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws. 4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in. 5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth. 6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones and primrose marshes, a short train ride away. 7) My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes. 8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets. 9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights of adolescence. 10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed behind in darkness. 11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually I caught up with them. 12) When I met you, the new language became the language of love. 13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 8 The daughter became a mother of daughters. 14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate present. 15) Years and years of this. 16) The children no longer children. An old man's pain, an old man's loneliness. 17) And then my father too disappeared. 18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my childhood, but it was closed to the public. 19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone's face was younger than mine. 20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I. Lisel Mueller www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 9 Five For Country Music I. Insomnia The bulb at the front door burns and burns. If it were a white rose it would tire of blooming through another endless night. The moon knows the routine; it beats the bushes from east to west and sets empty-handed. Again the one she is waiting for has outrun the moon. II. Old Money The spotted hands shake as they polish the coins. The shiny penny goes under the tongue, the two silver pieces weighted by pyramids will shut down the eyes. All the rest is paper, useless in any world but this. III. Home Movie She knows that walk, that whistle, that knock. It's the black wolf who sticks his floured paw underneath the door. She tries not to open. One look at his face and she'll drop the gun. He will pick it up and turn it on her where she waits, her eyes shining, her hands over her head.